


silverpoint's brew

by fishycorvid



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Light Angst, Lucretia is not a fucking villian 2K18, My First Work in This Fandom, Seven Birds - Freeform, Thinkpiece-y, gratuitous alcohol puns, post story and song, references to the Stolen Century, set at the post-wedding party, so like hella spoilers, technically this is kinda a sad fic but fuck you things can be more than one thing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-26
Updated: 2018-08-26
Packaged: 2019-07-02 14:11:25
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,441
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15798156
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fishycorvid/pseuds/fishycorvid
Summary: there are some realities where people have figured out how to distill silverpoint. this is not one of them, but they'll find a way in the end.(a conversation at carey and killian's wedding)





	silverpoint's brew

**Author's Note:**

> story and song had me real fucked up. while i don't believe that taako would forgive lucretia, at least not by then, i do believe it's hard not to miss family. and like it or not, the seven birds were family.

Everything already feels a little blurred around the edges, albeit pleasantly so, when Taako slings himself sidelong back onto the barstool he claimed as his own maybe an hour ago (distantly, he thanks whatever gods are in this final reality that Carey and Killian’s wedding has an unlimited bar with seemingly also unlimited alcohol). Nevertheless, he’s happy to see Ren pushing another drink his way, except––

 _Gods._

It’s been years, decades, hell, over a _century_ since he saw something this specific color. It’s pale-moon cool but still somehow manages to have warm hints of amber, but if you focus in too hard on those bits, they slip away, stars fading into cool morning light. Bitter and sweet and burning when it rushes its way down your throat. It’s a concoction that doesn’t even exist in this plane, much less this reality. 

He looks up, blinking sharply to clear away his dulled senses. “Ren, how’d you–” he starts, but she’s on the other end of the bar, taking someone else’s order. 

Taako examines the alcohol, rolls the clear, cold glass between his fingers. Sparks of white light move with the liquid like so many stars, and settle again when his hand stills. He makes an investigation check, then an arcana check, like maybe this is one of Davenport’s illusions from oceans away, but no: it’s the real thing. He almost huffs out a laugh, remembering his and Magnus’ and Lup’s abandoned plan to sneak some of the stuff on board, stealing it from the dinged-up, seedy club they went to on that final night back in their own reality. They’d forgotten, in the heat of the fight and the stolen shoes and the drinking, and when they woke up the next morning to board the ship, heads pounding, they knew without a shadow of a doubt they’d be back in two months’ time for more. 

And then the fucking _apocalypse_ happened. 

He drops the glass back down onto the smooth, polished wood table.

Ren appears back in front of him, smiling as bright as ever. “Hey! Listen, someone–” she flaps her hand in what could quite literally be any direction, “–ordered this for you. Does Silverpoint’s Brew have some different meaning for y’all than it does for us normal folks?”

He snorts. He’d nearly forgotten the name. 

“Definitely feels like poison when you wake up the next morning, but this is one-hundo-percent alcohol. How’d you even know how to make this? I mean, _I_ don’t even know the components.” 

She shrugs, dark elven fingers knotting together on the counter. “I got the ingredients here. Alcohol is alcohol, plus I can throw shit together and put some magic on it.” She quirks a smile at him that’s equal parts smug, rueful, and sharp-toothed. “The knowing, though– that’s always been someone else’s job. Not mine.” 

“Cut the cryptic bullshit, Ren–” Taako retorts, both sharply and idly, because he’s scanning the bar, peering around figures of all shapes and sizes and gods-know-what-else, and when he finds the slight, tired-looking form of Lucretia a couple seats down, she’s already looking back at him. A wave, too timid for the woman it belongs to. The elf swears softly and turns back to Ren, who raises her shoulders in a shrug, mouth drawn into a wry line, before scampering off to make someone else a drink. 

“Figures she’d know the fuckin’ recipe,” he grumbles, but approaches nevertheless, sliding into the empty stool next to her.

She smiles at him, and it just barely touches her eyes as she stares straight ahead, hardly physically acknowledging his presence. “Hello, Taako.” Even a seat down, he can see the way her hands shake where they’re clasped around her own concoction, a deep purple-blue liquid glowing a faint white at its edges. 

“Another goddamned voidfish drink?” he asks, tapping clumsy fingers against the counter. 

Lucretia snorts drily, edge of her lips twitching up, but he can still see the muscles in her body tensing, like she’s waiting for a blow, and he looks away. “Yeah. The themed drink names are a little much, aren’t they?” 

They’re all over this reality. Taaquila, Burncider, Merle-ot, Davenporter–– it’s fucking endless. Not that Taako would ever complain about free advertising, but _honestly,_ sometimes he wants to go to a bar and order something without his sister’s or captain’s or whoever-the-fuck-else’s name on it. 

“They didn’t even get the color right,” he grumbles. “Amateurs.” 

She laughs a little again, under her breath. A pause, during which Lucretia won’t meet his eyes, and he sighs softly, and he can feel his nails digging into wood, probably chipping and ruining the brilliant purple nail polish he’d stolen from Lup this morning, but he hardly notices. 

“Say whatever you want to say,” he says, just low enough that she has to focus on him again to hear, voice probably more acerbic than he meant. She flinches and finally turns to him, and she meets his eyes, and he almost wishes she hadn’t. 

She looks torn apart from the inside out. 

Somewhere in the back of his mind, he registers that she looks… younger. Not magically so—he knows enough about his own craft to be sure of that much—but instead with make-up. She doesn’t look like the Luce he knew back on the Starblaster, but she also doesn’t look like the Madam Director he’s known for the last few years. Maybe she’s just Lucretia this time, some more poetic part of him thinks, and the rest of him scoffs at. 

“I— Taako, I don’t know. I don’t fucking know.” The glass trembles in her hand, and she brings it to her lips to take a short sip, grimacing a little at the taste of whatever voidfish drink she’s suffering through. The irony, Taako thinks, is impeccable. 

He traces his finger over the grain of the wood. His own drink still sits in front of him, untouched. 

“Direc–” he starts, and then stops, mouth pulling into a thin line. “Lucretia.” 

She winces, just a little. The glass is back down on the table now, dark lipstick smudged around the rim. He’d done her make-up a few times back in one of the earlier cycles, before the planet of the judges, once he’d finally convinced her appreciating and enhancing her own beauty didn’t equate to vanity, unless you were Taako from TV, in which case both can absolutely go hand in hand. 

He doesn’t remember when she’d learned how to do it herself. 

_(“C’mon, Luce, lemme just––” Taako, cornering Lucretia in her quarters, though really, by around cycle twenty-three, dorm boundaries just ceased to exist with the exception of Davenport’s room._

_She laughs wildly, ducking out of the way of his lipstick and batting his hands away. “Taako––” she shrieks. “Absolutely not!”_

_“Lu-creeeeeee-tia!” he warbles, casting a Charm Person that misses by a mile._

_She huffs and flops down on her bed, narrowly missing hitting her head on the wall. “Don’t make me ugly.”_

_“Impossible,” he grins, with a warmth that now shows itself only rarely.)_

“You’re smarter than most people,” he mutters, nail catching in a groove in the counter. “So you know I can’t… forgive you. Not right now. And, well…” the elven man trails off, then looks back at Lucretia with a tired smile. “I’m not much in the business of forgetting anymore.” 

(He’s not. He doesn’t even let himself get too drunk, these days.) 

Another subtle wince. “Taako, I…” 

He exhales softly through his nose. “Yeah.” 

_(The first few times, he’d had to wrangle her into it, but she was grinning the whole time. After maybe the fourth or fifth time he’d burst into her room wielding highlight and eyeshadow and eyeliner and what have you, she just laughed at him and tilted her chin towards his hands._

_“Why are you so obsessed with makeup?” she asks him one time while he was doing her lipstick, and he’d yelped, wrenching it away before it could smudge._

_Once he moves on to her eyes, she asks again: “I mean, why does it matter to you so much? I’m sorry, it probably sounded rude before––”_

_He clicks his tongue to cut her off. “No, no, it’s a fair question.” He ponders it for a while, flicking her eyeliner quickly and perfectly. “It’s better than magic. It’s– well, I actually like the work. I like making art. I like looking good.” The elf pulls back with a grin, putting two slender fingers under her chin to gently tilt her head from side to side. “I mean, obviously I’m perfect already. But it’s always fun to prove that even perfection can be improved upon with a little bit of time and effort. Clearly. Lup was born a few minutes earlier, and, well, just_ look _at me.”_

_Lucretia laughs and blinks her eyes open. Taako flicks out a compact and shows her her reflection._

_“I look… nice,” she admits, a little shyer than usual._

_He hums an affirmation and drops a casual kiss onto her forehead. “‘Course you do, Luce.”_

_She snorts. “Yeah, yeah, I had you on the job.”_

_“Nah. You had you. But also me. Natch.”_

_The elf smiles at her as she turns her head this way and that, a quiet sort of grin curling up the edges of both of their lips.)_

“Have you tried your drink yet?” Her face is turned away from him like if she stares hard enough into off-brand and alcoholic voidfish juice, swirling and sickly, they will return to their recorded state again, resplendent and happy and family again. 

He casts a distracted look back at his Silverpoint’s Brew, but he can’t bring himself to care. He can see the way her lips are tense and trembling despite her casual tone, and that’s worse, so much worse, because he can’t deny that he knows her and she knows him. 

_(And she_ does _know him–– even when he and Lup tried to trick the rest of the IPRE by looking exactly alike, she always saw right through them, knowing the way his sister’s right ear quirks up ever so slightly, the way he bites his lips when he’s nervous and Lup nibbles at the inside of her cheek, the way his fingers fidget and hers still. They know that Davenport sometimes would show off just for their benefit, pulling the ship through a series of flips and rolls just to watch them grab onto the railing, laughing all the while. They know how Lup gets drunk more often than not, slinging herself over the both of them, and her laughter was smudged at the edges. He knows the way Lucretia fiddles with her pen when she’s flustered and can’t trust herself to look into his or Lup’s eyes. He knows the way the blush will spread across her cheeks when Lup gets too close, fingers tracing over her lips. He knows how eyeshadow will brush over her eyelids, glimmering and gentle. He knows that she’s scared of being isolated, just as much as he is._

_She knows how he smiles when he’s afraid._

_They know each other, and it only makes it worse.)_

Taako lets out a long breath and reaches for his drink. When it touches his lips, it tastes like nostalgia and feels like a kick in the chest. He puts it back down on the counter, and it makes a sharp noise that doesn’t match the sound glass and wood should make. 

He watches dark fingers skitter over the counter. “How is it?” she repeats quietly, and he huffs out a laugh. 

“It’s good. How’d you remember?” 

A weary grin. “I honestly don’t know.” 

“Figures.” A laugh, only half-forced, from him. 

It’s quiet, for a moment. Taako idly listens to the party rage on around them, to Carey cackling as Magnus attempts to dance with both her and Killian at once _(“It’s a father-daughter dance!” he squawks defensively, and Carey yells back over the music, “I’m older than you, dipshit!” as Killian laughs)._ Lup and Barry, waltzing somewhere to poor-fitting techno music. Merle, finally allowed to dance, in a flailing mess of dwarven limbs and off-beat hip thrusts that, miraculously, don’t seem to be creeping anyone out in their drunken, joyful haze. The music thrums through the walls, lodges itself under his skin, white-hot and burning. 

“Taako,” Lucretia starts again, and her voice cracks on the way out. When he looks back at her, all he can see are tears, dropping clear and bright onto polished wood. She still won’t meet his gaze, but he can see the forced blankness on her face and the sheen in her eyes. 

More broken than intended: “You— Gods, Lucretia, you took everything from me.” 

“I know,” she whispers, but leans towards him nevertheless, deep blue robe brushing his bare arm, and he doesn’t flinch away but holds himself still, tense. “And I’m not asking for forgiveness, Taako, I’m not, I’m asking for— I don’t know what I’m asking for. It’s so unfair, but— gods, I miss you Taako.” She presses the heels of her palms into her eyes, shoulder still touching his, and he doesn’t flinch away. 

“I’m an elf, Lucretia,” he says after a moment, and she pulls her hands away from her face like it’s the hardest thing she’s ever done and says nothing. “I’m an elf,” he repeats. “I’m going to live— I’m going to live for centuries after you. After Magnus. After Merle. Hell, even after Davenport. I’ve already outlived my sister and her husband. And I mean, I’m dating the literal Grim Reaper, but that doesn’t mean shit. We’re all gonna die. But I’m gonna die latest.” 

“Death doesn’t have much of a hold on us,” she murmurs, clutching at her own sleeves, and he laughs rawly. 

“I think they’ll take this time around. I have— I have _forever,_ Luce—” and she winces at the nickname, as if afraid, but still he blunders on, “Do you know how fuckin’ long that is?” 

She shakes her head and drops her hands to twist in her lap. 

“I can’t forgive you today, Luce. I can’t forgive you tomorrow, and I can’t forgive you the day after that, or the day after that, or the day after that, but gods, Luce, I have so many tomorrows.” 

He wraps an arm around her and she curls into his side, resting her head on his shoulder as she has so many times before, late nights on the Starblaster, talking and drinking and just sitting, silently, looking out at worlds that will turn to dust. 

_This world,_ Taako thinks, _will not be one of them._

**Author's Note:**

> thank you so much for reading!! this is my first work in the taz fandom, so please be kind. please read a comment or kudos if you enjoyed this! i'm fishycorvid on tumblr if you wanna chat it up with me. thank you again for reading, really everything means a lot <333


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